TED Fellow Jinha Lee speakers at TED2013 about collapsing the boundary between humans and computers.

“Throughout the history of computers, we’ve been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen,” interface designer Jinha Lee says in today’s talk.

Jinha Lee: Reach into the computer and grab a pixel
Lee points out that the gap has become shorter and shorter—it’s now “less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touchscreen glass,” he says. But his goal is to dissolve the boundary completely. In this talk, given at TED2013, he shows off a tool he invented that penetrates into a screen. He also reveals a technology that creates a digital workspace between a keyboard and translucent screen, allowing us to reach into digital worlds with our hands. And his wild ideas don’t stop there.

“If you remove this boundary,” says Lee, “the only boundary left is our imagination.”

Of course, we’ve been questioning what it means, on a deeper level, to shorten the gap between our digital technologies and ourselves since computers were invented, in terms of not only interacting with computing devices, but also making them ever more human. Here, media that either exemplify or address our increasing entwinement with our technologies.

Radiolab’s episode “Talking to Machines,” which aired in 2011, remains a classic and features several stories in which computers have so successfully imitated human beings that, well, it’s a little freaky. The episode begins with the story of a man who fell in love with a chatbot that learns from every conversation it has. There’s also a consideration of just why we feel for Furby, that cute little robot animal with personality. (Read the TED Blog’s exploration of toys that blur the line between pet, robot and friend.) And finally, Jon Ronson (watch his talk) interacts with Bina48, a robot modeled after a real woman..

Studio 360 also dealt with computers’ human capacity in the 2011 episode “Are computers creative?” that investigated the question of whether computers can make art. The episode introduces us to AARON, a computer program that’s been painting for four decades and a filmmaker who opted for an algorithm over an editor..

The TED Radio Hour episode “Do we need humans?” examines the possibility of a robot-reliant future of humanity, looking at how interactions between humans will change as technology accelerates. The episode includes interviews with four TED speakers who explore ideas of lifelike robots and connectivity in their talks: Sherry Turkle (watch her talk), Cynthia Breazeal (watch her talk), Andrew McAfee (watch her talk) and Abraham Verghese (watch his talk)..

Along similar, but possibly more unsettling, lines: the recent article in The Atlantic, “The Robot Will See You Now,” which looks at evidence that robots might be better at some things than doctors. IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that famously took down Ken Jennings on Jeopardy (watch his TED Talk about the experience), is now examining medical case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York — and doing an incredible job of recommending tests and treatments, based on the latest research.

Perhaps you know Ken Jennings by name, perhaps you simply know him as “that guy with the winning streak on Jeopardy.” In 2004, this trivia enthusiast won an incredible 74 consecutive times on Jeopardy, setting the record as the classic game show’s most winning contestant and securing the Guinness World Record at the time for “most cash won on a game show.”

“I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents and hold my own,” says Jennings in this talk, given at TEDxSeattleU. “There’s a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some …. Beattles factoid that dad didn’t know. You think, ‘Aha. Knowledge really is power.’”

In 2011, however, Jenning’s legacy changed when he accepted a match against the IBM supercomputer, Watson.

“I was pretty confident that I was going to win,” says Jennings of how he felt going into the match. “I had taken some Artificial Intelligence classes and I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on Jeopardy. People don’t realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a clue in a natural language like English — to understand the puns, the red herrings, to unpack just the meaning of the clue … I thought, ‘Yes I will come destroy the computer.’”

But that’s not exactly what happened. To hear how the match what down (interestingly, Jennings said it had an energy far more like a basketball game than a game show) and the profound lessons Jennings learned from it about the state of knowledge, watch this hilarious talk.

Shortly after the Jennings-Watson showdown in 2011, TED hosted a panel of IBM experts and insiders about the supercomputer and its Jeopardy victory. Below, see the discussion between Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine author Stephen Baker, Watson’s principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley and Columbia professor Herbert Chase.

“I felt obsolete,” he reveals. “I felt like a Detroit factory worker in the ‘80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like ‘Quiz Show Contestant’ was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers.”

Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.”

Mitch Resnick: Let's teach kids to code
Fluency, Resnick proposes in this TED Talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. He means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.

The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. Rather, it’s that coding is a gateway to broader learning.“When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says.Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too.

In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. Below, find 10 more places you can learn to code, incorporating Resnick’s suggestions and our own.

At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. (See this New York Times piece on Codecademy and other code-teaching sites, for a sense of the landscape.).

One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction. “We are committed to making sure women of all ages, races, education levels, income, and upbringing can build confidence in their skill set to develop web and mobile applications,” their website reads. “By teaching women around the world from diverse backgrounds to learn software development, we can help women improve their careers and confidence in their everyday lives.”.

If college courses seem a little slow, consider Code Racer, a “multi-player live coding game.” Newbies can learn to build a website using HTML and CSS, while the more experienced can test their adeptness at coding..

The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes. According to Clubhouse estimates, more than 25,000 kids work with mentors through the program every year..

Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers. (Know how to code? You can set up your own CoderDojo!).

Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools..

Similarly, Treehouse (the parent site of Code Racer) provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills..

Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams. “Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Yet females use the internet 17% more than their male counterparts,” the website notes..

Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,” founder Kimberly Bryant writes, and build “a new generation of coders, coders who will become builders of technological innovation and of their own futures.”

While we’re at it: bonus! General Assembly offers a variety of coding courses at their campuses across the globe. Additionally, their free online platform, Dash, teaches HTML, CSS and Javascript through fun projects on a simple interface that is accessible from your web browser.

As computers have gotten more complex, even tech literate users have become detached from the basics of how they function. This is what Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan noticed with their computer science students in Israel. As Schocken explains in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, the pair decided to have their students build a working computer, from the ground up, so that they would “understand how computers work in the marrow of their bones.” They broke down the process into a series of bite-sized, stand-alone units. While students start with building “Nand,” a simple logic gate, and they end by writing games like Pong, Snake and Tetris.

“You can imagine the joy of playing with a Tetris game that you wrote in Jack, and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also, and seeing the result running on a machine that you built,” says Schocken in his talk. “It’s a tremendous personal triumph.”

Even though “From Nand to Tetris (aka The Elements of Computing Systems)” took their team five years to develop, Schocken and Nisan made the decision to put all parts of it online — from the chip specifications to the software tools. Thousands of people jumped at the opportunity to take the course online, some making their way through it on their own and others organizing classes with friends. The year was 2005 and “From Nand to Tetris” became the first of what are now known as MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. Schocken was surprised by the wide participation, and was thrilled that students remixed parts of the course, making video tutorials in other languages and creating their own games within the computer’s parameters (some examples after the jump).

To Schocken, the message is loud and clear. Educators don’t always need to teach per se — they can also provide a framework that allows students to experiment.

“These people could not care less about grades. They are doing it because of one motivation only — they have a tremendous passion to learn,” says Schocken. “Grading takes away all the fun from failing.”

To hear how Schocken’s parents fed his belief in self-study, and to find about his newest project making K-12 math classes all about experimentation, watch his talk. Below, find out how you can take “From Nand to Tetris” online and build your own computer.

In this introductory video, Schocken gives a detailed overview of what you’ll learn if you embark upon “From Nand to Tetris.” The course is divided into 14 topics, beginning with “Boolean Logic” and building through “Operating System.” Each topic has a lecture — available in both PowerPoint and PDF format — as well as a chapter to read and a project for the student to work on at their own pace. Get started at the online hub for the class >>

Below, some of the games students have created as their final projects.

Ben Craddock, a student at the University of Georgia, designed his computer to run entirely in “Minecraft.” His project was covered in Wired magazine.

This student incorporated letters into Tetris for their final project. The goal: type the letters before they hit your city.

And here, a Tetris-like game calls “Blox,” also created in the course.

“Man versus machine” is not an idea that Shyam Sankar believes in. In today’s fascinating talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012, Sankar urged us to think about how human ingenuity can combine with computers’ ability to parse data to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. His point: Technology should make use of human creativity, rather than aiming to replace it.

Below, in a TED Blog exclusive recorded at TED2010, Sankar explains how his company, Palantir Technologies, helped create software to solve a mystery: Who hacked the Dalai Lama’s email?

Here is the story.

In 2008, an unnamed country received an email from China warning them not to host the Dalai Lama for a scheduled visit. The email was startling for a single reason: The upcoming visit was not public knowledge yet. And so the country brought in a team of data experts to find out where the message had come from and how this sensitive info had been leaked. The team used Palantir’s data analysis tools to help crack the case.

As it turns out, the Dalai Lama’s email had been targeted by spies using a practice known as “spear-fishing” — in which hackers do research on a specific person to create an email that looks like it came from someone they know well. The email includes an attachment that, if opened, gives hackers access to the target’s computer without their knowledge. As Sankar explains, hackers can not only read your email, export documents and send emails as you — they can even turn on your webcam and hear every word you say.

In this case, the hackers had downloaded negotiation documents off the Dalai Lama’s computer.

“These guys literally took the goods while sitting at home in their pajamas,” says Sankar in the talk.

But in the hands of a team of human data experts, Palantir’s technology helped showed something even more sinister at work. About 1,300 computers in 103 countries had been infected in the same way. The computers belonged to both individuals and companies with interests in Southeast Asia. And this network had existed for a shocking two years before it was made visible.

It’s a story that should warn us all to be very careful when it comes to opening attachments.